BOS FILM FESTIVAL 2011
June 4 & 5, 6-10pm
organized by Microscope Gallery
free admission
Featuring films, videos and performances by:
Eric Cheevers, Ben Coonley, Brian Frye, Andrew Lampert, Jeanne Liotta, Yasue Maetake, Jason Martin, Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager, Optipus, Ray Sweeten, Cartune Xprez, Genevieve White, Seth Fragomen, Allison Somers, Courtney Fathom Sell & Billy Feldman, Henry G. Sanchez, Pia Coronel, Matthew de Leon, Steve Cossman, Erica Russo, Valerie Khoudari Ratner (w/ music by Michel Mazza), Alex Lake, Rachael Morrison, Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, James Gannon & Joseph K. Gannon, Melissa Skluzacek, Joe Lueben, Stephanie Wuertz.
Microscope Gallery is curating the first BOS Film Festival, as part of Bushwick Open Studios 2011 and in conjunction with the BOS Music Festival. BOSFF offers 2 nights of film, music videos, YouTube channel works, live performance, and more from emerging to internationally recognized film & video artists. The 5 programs each day include: featured artist presenting & performing their works in person, group shows by artist collectives, and curated programs including Bushwick Survey, a selection of short films & videos by Bushwick area artists who responded to our call for submissions. Come have a look!
Works by Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Brian Frye
MAIN PROGRAM
Full schedule:
SATURDAY JUNE 4
6.00 Bushwick Survey – Program 1: Innovative and unusual works by Bushwick area film & videomakers selected through an open call. (full program below)
6.45 Jason Martin: Power Animals: videos and live performance. Topics include: power structures, species and gender hybridity, witchcraft, conflict, and analog electronics.
Jason Martin is an artist and musician into glamorous paganistic animism, making work with films of light and water and half-animal people in shiny spandex inspired by 80s workout videos and Hanna Barbera cartoons. Power Animals are part of the species-queer transdimensional shift in New York City USA North America, in the 3rd dimension, around the year 2010 CE. Jason is living in Brooklyn NY, recently going back to school and completing an MFA at NYU Steinhardt School of Visual Arts. Jason comes from upstate New York, where he made art, music, curated events, and built analog music recording studios.
More info at http://www.jasonmartinwebsite.com
7.45 Jeanne Liotta: works from Liotta’s YouTube channel w/ live record player sound + visuals.
Jeanne Liotta was born and raised in NYC where she makes films and other cultural ephemera. Her most recent body of work, The Science Project, encompasses a constellation of mediums at a curious intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy. Observando El Cielo, her 16mm film of the night skies was voted one of the decades’ best by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, won the Tiger Award for Short Film at Rotterdam in 2008, and was listed in both the Village Voice and Artforum’s Top Ten Films of 2007. More info at www.jeanneliotta.net
8.30 Eric Cheevers: 16mm films and music videos selected from his works with The Walkmen, The Raveonettes, Dead Meadow, Weird War, Title Tracks and others.
Eric Cheevers is an award-winning director of films and music videos that have exhibited at film festivals such as Slamdance, the Los Angeles Short Film Festival, Cannes, and Anthology Film Archives, among many others. In addition to museums and colleges in the US and abroad, Eric’s music videos have been exhibited on MTV, and he has been commissioned to create film pastiches of 60s-era NASA footage for use in ONE Management’s Spring/Summer 2010 promotion and fashion shows. A devotee of celluloid and traditional film aesthetics, Eric continues to shoot on 16mm film, in addition to editing on flatbed editors.
9.15 Cartune Xprez: program of videos organized by Peter Burr. Featuring works by Jacob Ciocci, Adrian Freeman, Shana Moulton, Duncan Malashock, Nic Chancellor, Bruce Bickford, Hooliganship, Andrew Benson, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Clare Rojas, and more.
Cartune Xprez is a video label / roadshow / cartoon gang. They organize DVDs, exhibitions, and world tours with the work of many artists and performers. More info at www.cartunexprez.com
SUNDAY JUNE 5
6.00 Bushwick Survey – Program 2: A second program of innovative and unusual works by Bushwick area film & video makers selected through an open call. (full program below)
6.45 Performances Eye to Eye: videos by Brian Frye, Andrew Lampert, Yasue Maetake, Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager, Genevieve White. Afterwards, Genevieve White will perform a new site-specific piece Water Balloons.
Brian L. Frye is a filmmaker, journalist, and law professor. His films have appeared in many museums and festivals, including the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. He was awarded a 2000 Jerome Foundation grant. His writing on film and art has appeared in many books and magazines, including The New Republic, Film Comment, and Cineaste. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Hofstra Law School.
Born in the mid-70s in the Midwest, Andrew Lampert has staged performances and exhibited his films/videos at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Getty Museum, PS1, The British Film Institute, The Kitchen, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, Kill Your Timid Notion Festival, Light Industry, The Poetry Project, The Brakhage Symposium, Mitchell Algus Gallery and many other venues here and abroad. He lives in Brooklyn.
Genevieve White is a performance and visual artist currently based living and working in New York City.
She works in video, performance, dance, installation, photography, drawing and writing.
She has performed among others at New Museum, Deitch Projects, The Kitchen, 151 Gallery, Artist’s Space, Envoy Enterprises, Cooper Union, NYU Gallery, Summer Stage Festival, the Whitney Museum, Deitch Gallery, the Perfoma Festival, the Neuberger Museum, the Rover Space.
Yasue Maetake works in a variety of media including sculpture, video and other 2-dimensional works. She seamlessly employs materials often from the natural world and synthetics in bizarre form sculpture. In her video, quasi-narratives style is built on a few simply shot passages of subtly inexplicable activity. Maetake received an MFA from Columbia University in 2006.
Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager are artists who live and work in Brooklyn, NY. Their work has been shown at venues such as The Pompidou Center (Paris), the Jeu de Paume (Paris), The Reina Sofia National Gallery (Madrid), the Edificio de Tabacalera (Madrid), The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), the 303 Gallery, Momenta Art and Participant, Inc. (NYC), and recently at Rotterdam International Film Festival and IndieLisboa, Portugal.
8.00 Ray Sweeten: oscilloscope & video feedback works
Ray Sweeten is a composer and software developer, working in the intersection between image and sound using a hybrid of digital and analog media. He has produced work for Michael Galasso and Rober Wilson, Sesame Street, Experimental Television, Harvestworks. Sweeten has performed and screened work at The Kitchen, PS1, NY Underground Film Festival, San Fransisco Electronic Music Festival, CinemaTexas, The Stone, Liverpool Biennial, Aurora Picture Show, Lux Spain, and has held youth workshops for electronic music at Community Musicworks (RI), Vibe Songmakers (NY), and The Guggenheim Museum (NY).
More info at www.raysweeten.com
8.30 Ben Coonley: Compromising Superimpositions, a selection of cat videos, edutaining instructional films, philosophical dramatizations, and other sludge from the avant-gutter.
Ben Coonley is a video and performance artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. His work has been shown at venues including P.S.1, Performa 09, The New Museum, Moscow Biennial, Images Festival, Migrating Forms and YouTube. He is an Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College.
9.00 Optipus: presenting Optipus: Vidipus & Cinepus, a program of brief videos from the group & a live hybrid multi-projector video, film, and sound extravaganza. Including works from Bradley Eros, Tim Geraghty, Sarah Halpern, Rachelle Rahme, Katherine Bauer, Rachael Abernathy, Lisa Kletjian & David Baker.
“We are a collective of artists, all makers of film or video, with much experience in photography, music, collage, and performance, and committed to a DIY approach to working and organizing, curating and exhibiting, in gallery, screening and performative situations. We have an extensive history of collaboration, especially in lower Manhattan, some extending over 30 years on the Lower East Side, including programming and showing at such venues as: Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, ABC No Rio, Collective Unconscious, Tonic, The Pioneer Cinema, PS122, The Living Theatre, 6 & B Garden, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Pianos, Cake Shop, Participant Inc, The Pyramid, Angel Orensanz, Salon 94 & NYU.” — Optipus (film group)
WHERE:
BOS Film Festival 2011
Goodbye Blue Monday (back room)
1087 Broadway
Brooklyn NY 11221
Works by Steve Cossman, Rachael Morrison
OPEN CALL PROGRAM
BUSHWICK SURVEY – Program 1
SATURDAY JUNE 4, 6PM
Hicaz
by Seth Fragomen
16mm, col, sound, 2010, 3 mins
(w/ live sound by Seth Fragomen)
This film was inspired by a Turkish musical scale called “Hicaz”, which is part of a Turkish system of improvisation called Makam. I approached the making of this film like an improvisation, improvising with a bolex camera and through the process of shooting the film, I found a sort of journey emerging. I was reading a lot of Jung and was working with the idea of creating a journey into interiority. By improvising at every level of filmmaking – from shooting the film entirely in-camera, to developing all of the film in a lomo tank – I was able to play with every level of filmmaking and the more I improvised with these elements, the more I found that objects of the exterior world, everyday objects like plants, trees, TV screens, and stairways seemed to become part of this interiority.
Garden
by Allison Somers
16mm, b/w, silent, 2010, 3 mins
A survey of the materials, forms, and fragments which landscape an abandoned family retreat.
The Hole
by Courtney Fathom Sell and Billy Feldman
video, col, sound, 2010, 9 mins
Recently named Best Documentary at the Red Hook Film and Video Festival, The Hole is a short portrait of a forgotten, below-sea-level NYC neighborhood— where the Federation of Black Cowboys is based, and where the Mob is said to dump bodies… — Mark Asch (The L Magazine)
Spin
by Henry G. Sanchez
video, col, sound,3:25 mins
The audio of Spin is a conversation between a father about his artist son’s romantic past. The video of Spin is captured from a moving car (traveling across bridges and tunnels) and of rotating objects (mirrored balls and ferris wheels). The discussion centers around the father’s searing interpretation and blunt assessment of his son’s failed attempts at marriage and relationships. The juxtaposition of hypnotic and moving pictures with the frank and critical commentary conveys how personal history is often remembered through seemingly unrelated imagery.
Adrift
by Pia Coronel
video, col, silent, 2010, 5:18 mins
Adrift is about feelings of isolation to a point of nonexistence.
Out There
by Matthew de Leon
video, col, sound, 2011, 3:20 mins
The boyfriends are separated for the summer; The actor away at summerstock, and the artist at home in the apartment. In a duet apart, they search for each other in song.
Jive
by Steve Cossman
video, col, sound, 2011, 8 mins
To view photography is a time-based experience. Inherent in the image are lines, planes, and patterns.
A composition which guides the eye through the work. I divided a found photograph into 96 pieces, each 720 x 480 pixels in size. Using the new composition of the smaller frames, the viewer is lead through the piece – first along the ‘obvious’ path, then in new and ways which were impossible in its original / still format.
Fenway Park I & II
by Erica Russo
guitar cam with video, col, sound, 5:30 mins total
Works by Stephanie Wuertz, Henry G. Sanchez
BUSHWICK SURVEY – Program 2
SUNDAY JUNE 5, 6PM
Geiger
by Valerie Khoudari Ratner
edited and music composed by Michel Mazza
video (shot in 16mm), b/w, sound, 2011, 2 mins
It’s a short film about the feeling of fear left on us after the fukushima incident…we are running out of time…
Miasma Swells
by Alex Lake
16mm, col, silent, 2010, 6 mins
Bells swing, grasses blur — a fence — colors swoop, buildings radiate with energy, tree on fire, etc… bells return…
Waste
by Rachael Morrison
video, col, sound, 2010, 5:46 mins
Waste is an imaginative exploration of what happens to our trash after it is thrown out. It is a comment on the growing island of trash in the Pacific Ocean, purported to be about the size of the state of Texas. The animation is composed of made and found images and audio.
And They Watched the World All Around
by Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa
music by Tristan Shepherd
16mm, col, sound, 2011, 8:30 mins
This ten-minute film, is the third and final section of a larger work exploring human notions and negotiations of their own borders.
Focusing on our approach to the world outside, this section integrates the human, as filmmaker and audience, the machine, as camera and projector, and the natural, as content. The piece raises questions of our ability to navigate, conceptualize, and segment these categories. It was shot in Teaneck, New Jersey in a swamp by the side of a highway.
Three Envelopes
by James Gannon & Joseph K. Gannon
video, col, sound, 2011, 14:47 mins
Concerned about the inevitable death of their parents, filmmakers Joseph and James Gannon sit down with their parents for an intimate conversation about death.
Hoping to get answers from them before its too late. They ask what its like to go through the loss of a parent and how to deal with it. What follows is a very personal observation of the open wounds that never fully heal from the loss and the realization that your parents are thinking about their own death as much as you are.
Smoke and Mirrors
by Melissa Skluzacek
video, col, sound, 2011, 3:16 mins
A temporary sculptural installation created during a residency at Rural Projects near Hudson, NY was used as a set for Smoke and Mirrors. Often when constructing temporary installations, I shoot video works of the environments I create. Objects found within the vicinity of the installation are used. Installations I construct become landscapes, or urban utopian environments that verge on a dystopian reality. The videos I produce in this method often reveal underlying albeit subtle historical references and unique characteristics that acknowledge a past whose present form as installation and video become warnings for the future.
Relapse
by Joe Lueben
video, col, sound, 2011, 2:50 mins
After 45 days of sobriety, filmmaker Joe Lueben has a relapse.
Photographer C.J. Moses is there to capture his hopped up journey from the streets of Brooklyn to the underbelly of Manhattan. Both dreamy and haunting, Relapse is a meditation on the effects of drugs and the difficulty of remaining sober.
Bodily Heavens
by Stephanie Wuertz
video, col, sound, 2011, 4:36 mins
A whirl of whorls and dis-astral staccato, Bodily Heavens is a frenetic animation created under a microscope that evokes a nostalgia for the intimate sublime.
Works by Seth Fragomen, Courtney Sell and Billy Feldman, James and Joseph Gannon, Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa
